Benchmarking for Improved Configuration

Overview

Coupa provides great reporting capabilities that can guide you in setting up your configuration. So now the question is: what do I look for and what do I do?

There are several dashboards available to you:

The Main Dashboard

Purchase Metrics

Expense Metrics

Liquidity

Supplier Performance

Benchmarking

While all the dashboards provide valuable information, we’re going to focus on Benchmarking.

Benchmarking

In order to get started with this, you need to enable the Benchmarking Dashboard:

Just select Yes! under the Benchmarking section of your Dashboard Controls setup. Once you're enrolled in the program, Coupa will add your data anonymously and in aggregate to our pool of benchmarking customer data and show you how stack up against the average.

In order to see benchmarking data, you have to share your own data. Don’t worry! We know your spend data is important to you, so we keep it completely anonymous. No other customers will have any access to your specific data. Coupa only uses it to help calculate our benchmarked KPI's.

Free-Form Requests

Free-form requests are very convenient, but if your average is significantly above the market you should look into:

Using catalogs. Several options are available to you from Punch-outs to internally hosted catalogs. Look at the top commodities being purchased and the top suppliers in order to give you an idea where to start. The user experience will be enhanced as well with catalog items, as they have even less data to enter in the cart!

Do you have users buying recurring items? What about creating some order forms?

Requisitions Approval Cycle Time

Why are your requisitions taking a long time to be approved?

You can look at:

Do you have a large number of approvers?

Can this number be reduced while maintaining a good level of control?

Can you increase the dollar amount threshold between one approver to the next?

Have you thought of auto-approval for low dollar amount requisitions?

Are your requisitions sitting with an approver that takes a long time to go over them?

You can also set the requisitions to automatically escalate to next approver after a given time frame you can define (for this, go to setup/approval/automatically escalate to next approver).

E-Invoices

E-invoicing greatly reduces the amount of work for your AP group. E-invoicing can be implemented through different channels:

Set vendors for E-invoicing with great enhanced features available in R12

With scan solutions, we can help you get set-up with one of our partners

Take advantage of the CSN. It is free and easy for both the supplier and your group.

Invoice Hold

If an invoice is on hold, you probably will not be able to take advantage of the early payment discount and you will most likely have the supplier reach out to you in cases of late payment increasing the amount of work on the AP side.

Here are a few things to help you avoid the holds:

Set a 2 or 3 way match

Reduce the number of invoices you want to be routed for approval

Set invoicing tolerance

Key Take-A-Ways

Take advantage of the benchmarking dashboard.

With a few easy configuration tune ups, you can save time and money. Why wait?